Meryl Streep to Join Carey Mulligan in Suffragette

Meryl Streep, who recently outed herself and her friend Emma Thompson as "rabid, man-hating feminist[s]," has signed on to play British feminist icon Emmeline Pankhurst in the Sarah Gavron-directed, Abi Morgan-penned Suffragette. The actual Pankhurst, arguably the UK's most famous agitator for women's right to vote, died just a few weeks before the British Parliament granted female suffrage in 1928.

Suffragette will star Carey Mulligan as a "foot soldier of the early feminist movement," according to Screen Daily. Streep's role will reportedly be small but memorable.

It's unsurprising that Suffragette's core background players -- Gavron, Morgan, and producers Faye Ward and Alison Owen -- are all women. What is surprising -- and notable, and worthy of outrage -- is that there are so few movies about suffragists in the first place. Other than the 2004 HBO movie Iron Jawed Angels, starring Hilary Swank as real-life firebrand Alice Paul, this incredibly dramatic, inspirational, and movie-ready slice of history has been utterly ignored by Hollywood.

Earlier this year, I blamed George Clooney for contributing to the ongoing erasure of women from the screen -- "the fictitious villages and jungles and kingdoms and interplanetary civilizations [in the movies] nearly bereft of female population" that Geena Davis recently described as the film industry's norm -- and thus also from our collective memory of history.

But of course, Clooney's not alone. Whether it wants the responsibility or not, Hollywood is a major contributor to how we as a culture decide whose stories are important -- and whose are not. And the numbers show an ongoing decline in the rate of movies about women: only 11% of the top 100 grossing films in 2011 featured girls and women as the main characters, down from 16% in 2002. So of course Suffragette is an important step in the right direction -- and believe me, I'll be the first in line when it's released -- but it's clear we have a long way to go.